The kings bed, p.21
The King's Bed, page 21
The relationship between the actress and the monarch became so close and enduring that the King’s initial caution in the matter of gifts was superseded by greater generosity. As time went by the bond between the girl from the slums of Coal Yard Alley and the King endured, she was awarded an income (called a ‘pension’) of £4000 a year – later increased to £5000 – and given several properties including a house at Windsor, named Burford House, and an estate in Nottinghamshire. In the amoral way of the Restoration court, she was handed the annual income from duties paid on logwood – income that should have correctly gone into the public exchequer.
This piece of good fortune illustrated one of the problems the King faced in mid seventeenth-century England: the system that enabled the monarch to give public money to his current favourite mistress also ensured that the exchequer did not have a dependable stream of income. Public finance was run through a system of private operators. Officials in charge of gathering money and taxes did not see themselves as directly beholden to the state as they had purchased their positions, often at great expense. Nell’s popularity was such that, should the public have been informed of the diversion of the tax money, it was unlikely there would have been much objection.
Although given gifts of money and property, what Nell really wanted was a title for her son. This was not initially forthcoming. On Christmas Day 1671, she gave birth to a second son. The boy was christened James, after the Duke ofYork. Nell continued to hope her sons might have titles, like the other royal progeny. But the King was loath to give way to her request.
For the vast majority of the British people Nell was to maintain one great advantage over her more aristocratic rivals – she was a Protestant. In a country increasingly jittery over religion and the question of the succession, this mattered. The story is told by several sources (though without any well-defined initial source or date) of Nell travelling through Oxford in her coach when an angry crowd assailed it, mistakenly thinking it was that of a Catholic mistress. As the scene turned ugly, Nell poked her head out the window and said, ‘Good people, be civil; I am the Protestant whore!’
Nell understood the mood of the English people a great deal better than her royal lover; or perhaps Charles knew it too, but did not care what the people thought of him and his apparently Catholic court. Either way, his indifference would help to lend credence to rumours and accusations that would ripple through the nation for years to come. Unbeknown even to the gossiping court, there was substance to the speculation thanks to the influence of a foreign king – Louis XIV of France.
* Chapbooks were cheap pamphlets, usually of only four pages, containing poems, ballads and stories, illustrated with woodcuts.
14
A SECRET PACT
No one was more interested in the backstairs gossip from Whitehall than Louis XIV of France, the Sun King. One of Louis’s instructions to his ambassador in London, Charles Colbert de Croissy, was to rake through the palace dirt and report. ‘I think it would please the king if you were to send . . . gossiping letters about everything that happens in the private life of the king of England,’ Croissy was told by his brother, Louis’s chief Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert.1 Thereafter the ambassador gathered every detail he could of Barbara’s and Charles’s multiple affairs and the tantrums and deceptions attending them. The thirty-year-old French king wanted chapter and verse on all the other major players in Charles’s court, too.
Louis delighted in sex no less than his philandering cousin in England. Both exhibited the same rampant libido as their grandfather Henri IV and both presided over courts swimming in licentiousness. But although the French king may have gained some vicarious thrill from digging through the Whitehall dirt, Louis’s prime interest in wanting the details was less prurient. His strategic aim was the conquest of Flanders. That required the compliance of England and had him greedy for information on all things English. For hours on end he buried himself in bulky reports from across the Channel, studying the minutiae of Stuart rule and gobbling up material on England’s Parliament, its navy, its currency, religion, pastimes, wars, even literature. The Sun King played hard like Charles, but he worked hard too on getting to know the opposition.
A first step in the seduction of England had come back in 1668 when the French initiated talks on a possible commercial treaty. The ambassador was instructed to use the talks ‘to soften the animosity of the English and give a sop to their traders’ while establishing ties with ‘political men’. He was told to use ‘all pretexts’ to prolong the commercial talks till these contacts were established.2
Initially, the focus was on the two rival heavyweights in the ruling Cabal, the Secretary of State, Lord Arlington and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. The French king wrote: ‘If each has a strong motive for helping me, they will both, however they may detest each other, plot for a common object.’ He added: ‘The affair is so important that I am willing to make any sacrifice of money.’3 In that respect Louis would prove a man of his word. He would douse England’s warring politicians, their mistresses and their king in bribes throughout the following decade.
Colbert de Croissy was authorised to buy the allegiance of the stridently pro-Spanish and anti-French Arlington, a former ambassador in Madrid, with a massive bribe – silver plate worth 100,000 crowns plus a yearly pension of 10,000 crowns, although in the event the bribe was not proffered. At his first meeting with Arlington, Colbert de Croissy found him so hostile to the idea of an alliance with France that he referred back to Louis before talking money. Louis instructed him to withhold the offer for the moment. As for Buckingham, he was pro-French anyway and for the moment Colbert held back from approaching him directly.
The ambassador’s next target was Barbara Castlemaine. She had been as ardently Francophobe as Arlington. Back in 1665, when Louis dispatched a special mission to London in his vain attempt to prevent the second Anglo-Dutch war, the Frenchmen had put their failure down to an anti-French alliance struck up by Lady Castlemaine and the Spanish ambassador, Count Molina. Since then the Spanish had stirred Barbara’s ire by attempting to interest Charles in a new mistress. A petulant Barbara was ready to switch camps.
At the age of twenty-eight Barbara was still a heart-stopper to look at, but her ties with the King had loosened. She had lost her apartment in the palace when Charles moved her out to Berkshire House, the mansion that he bought for her just beyond the palace complex. According to some, he no longer slept with her. His appetites were satisfied by such as Moll, Nell and the odd mopsy arranged by Chiffinch or Baptist May. Moreover, the spectre of Frances Stuart loomed again to darken Barbara’s skies. After only about a year in exile, Frances had been allowed to return to court thanks to Queen Catherine, who made her a lady-in-waiting at Somerset House.
The news prompted Barbara to take to her bed for two weeks, reportedly incandescent that her rival was being allowed back. Frances was no longer the fresh, unspoiled beauty who had so frustrated the King. The attack of smallpox which had so concerned Charles earlier that year had left her with some disfigurement and also damaged one eye. But the King still found her attractive. Perhaps her misfortune softened his attitude, for after staying aloof from Frances for a year he started visiting her at Somerset House, often at night. It was quickly assumed that she finally did succumb to the royal lust. Charles was reported to have let this drop as fact – indeed boasted of it, according to one source – during a drunken session with Frances’s husband, the Duke of Richmond.4 The latter was later given a diplomatic post, as ambassador to Denmark that kept him mostly out of England. He died abroad just four years later. Frances did not remarry.
At various moments during the 1660s the King appeared to be on the point of disowning Barbara but her survival instincts always won through. At the end of the decade, in January 1669, Pepys recorded, ‘My Lady Castlemaine is now in higher command over the King than ever – not as a mistress, for she scorns him but as a tyrant to command him.’ Two months later he heard a courtier from the Duke of York’s household say that Lady Castlemaine was ‘never more great with the King than she is now’.5
Barbara’s supreme self-confidence had left her seemingly unabashed by the bawdy house riots and the stream of written attacks on her. She as good as challenged the mob by parading through the streets in an eight-horse carriage. Far from abusing her, Londoners filled ‘the streets, balconies and windows . . . to admire her’.6
The French ambassador’s first meeting with Barbara was encouraging. The Lady signified her readiness to accept overtures from France. As an instance of her willingness to change horses, Barbara divulged details of a talk that she had held with the King about the possibilities of a French alliance. Charles had told her that the Secretary of State, Arlington, ‘would not hear’ of such a move. That was less than earth-shattering news, but even so Louis thought it well worth the ambassador’s time to pursue Barbara and had his foreign minister Lionne instruct Colbert to go ahead.
‘The King,’ Lionne told the ambassador, ‘thinks well of your efforts to obtain the help of the Countess of Castlemaine, and read with interest of her frank way of telling you how King Charles had confided to her that Lord Arlington would not hear of an alliance with France.’ Louis called this ‘a good beginning’ and authorised a ‘handsome present’ for the lady. ‘You can give it as if from yourself,’ Colbert was told. ‘Ladies are fond of such keepsakes, whatever may be their breeding or disposition; and a nice little present can in any case do no harm.’7
Colbert was displeased at the prospect of having to dip into his own pocket. He told his masters that he was running out of money. ‘I have given away all that I brought from France, not excepting the skirts and smocks made up for my wife,’ he complained, ‘and I have not money enough to go on at this rate. Nor do I see the use of going to much expense, in satisfying the greed of the women here for rich keepsakes.’
He put forward another objection too. ‘If handsome gifts are lavished on Madame Castlemaine, his majesty may think that, in spite of his assertions to the contrary, we fancy that she rules him, and take it in bad part. I should therefore advise giving her only such trifling tokens as a pair of French gloves, ribands, a Parisian undress gown, or some little object of finery.’8
Louis ignored the warning. In May 1669, Ralph Montagu, the English ambassador in Paris (and Edward Montagu’s son), informed Arlington that a very expensive gift was on its way to Barbara. He wrote:
I went to Mariall’s to look for gloves and I saw a present which I am sure must cost a thousand pounds packing up. I found since that it is for my Lady Castlemaine which you will quickly know there. I asked him who it was for, but he would not or could not tell me. I asked him who paid him; he told me, the King of France.9
Charles was indeed sensitive to the suggestion that he was manipulated by anyone. The considerable ego of the man bridled at the idea of letting himself be used. Back in 1667 he had walked out of that final meeting with Clarendon when the old Chancellor blamed Lady Castlemaine for his dismissal. The King’s touchiness was reflected in letters to his sister. In one letter he wrote: ‘One thing I desire you to take as much as you can out of the French King’s head that my ministers are anything but I would have them be.’ In other words, that he controlled his ministers, not vice versa. In another letter he told the Duchess, ‘Whatsoever opinions my ministers have been of I would and do always follow my own judgment.’10
What only a tiny handful of people knew was that the two kings were already negotiating a military and political pact, and there were no ministers or advisors, let alone lovers present while the basics were hammered out. The matchmaker was Minette, Charles’s adored sister. She had been encouraged by Louis to push her brother towards an alliance with France and had become the intermediary while Charles and Louis circled round each other, trying for a pact and giving even their closest advisors no inkling of what was afoot.
Minette, the youngest of Charles’s siblings, was fourteen years his junior. She was pretty, petite, promiscuous, witty and a ruthless schemer in the Stuart cause. When, in 1663, assassins in Switzerland murdered one of the men who had signed her father’s death warrant, Minette was suspected of being behind the killing. Plots to murder other republican refugees are thought to have been funded by her as well. Minette was married to King Louis XIV’s only brother, Philippe. Like Buckingham, sent home in disgrace after making an open play for the bride’s affections while officially escorting her from London to Paris, the then unmarried Louis had flirted with her outrageously, and had been reprimanded for it by his formidable mother, Anne of Austria. The marriage between Minette and the ill- tempered Duke of Orléans, whose courtesy title was ‘Monsieur’, was a disaster. Monsieur turned out to be a transvestite bisexual. He and Minette are said to have enjoyed a deliriously happy honeymoon lasting two weeks, followed by years of backbiting, jealousy and then hatred. Much of the ill will centred around Monsieur’s ostentatiously gay lover, the Chevalier de Lorraine, but it was also stirred by Minette’s infidelities. She had a string of lovers who were said to have included even the Duke of Monmouth, her teenage nephew. The hot blood of Henri IV ran strong in her veins too, as, of course, it also did in young Monmouth’s.
Of all Charles’s women, Minette was probably the only one he came close to trusting. ‘She has much more power over the king her brother than any other person in the world,’ Colbert de Croissy told King Louis, ‘not only by the eagerness the other ministers have shown to implore her favour and support with the King and by the favours he has accorded simply at her request . . . but also by the King’s own confession and the tears he shed on bidding her farewell.’11
The pact for which Minette acted as nursemaid was the notorious secret Treaty of Dover between England and France. This was a breathtaking military and political deal. Under its terms Louis was to pay Charles huge subsidies to join France in attacking and dismembering the Netherlands, while, in return for still more money, Charles was to declare himself a Catholic. Louis was also committed to sending his brother monarch troops and further dollops of cash ‘in case the said King’s subjects should not acquiesce in the said declaration and rebel against his said Britannic Majesty’.
It is difficult to believe that the wily Charles seriously intended to risk his throne by declaring for Rome and banking on a French invasion should things go wrong. His father had lost his head for far less. He recognised that some thought him ‘mad’, but in a long interview with Colbert, Charles dismissed the objections. He argued that anti- Catholicism had been overplayed and that he was much better placed to suppress opposition than Charles I had been. If his father had had so many troops as Charles now had, ‘he would have stifled at birth the troubles that caused his ruin.’12
From the start in 1668, negotiations between the two monarchs were clothed in secrecy. Contact between Charles and his sister was through letters in cipher while her contact with Louis was head to head, duchess to king. In December 1668, Charles, writing to his sister, assured her that his plan – or ‘grand design’ as he called it – was known only to himself and to ‘one person more’.13 On the French side only Minette and Louis were in the picture.
Charles obsessed about Buckingham finding out. Perhaps the only streak of consistency in the Duke’s entire body was his hatred of Catholicism, and Charles knew that his boyhood friend would explode were he to hear of his grand design. Minette and Buckingham were old friends if not more than that, and the King pleaded with Minette to be prudent. ‘Write but seldom to him,’ he urged of her correspondence with Buckingham, ‘for fear something may slip from your pen, which may make him jealous that there is something more than he knows of.’ In another letter referring to the Duke, Charles warned: ‘The great secret, that which concerns Religion . . . he must not be trusted with.’
There were leaks. In April 1669 there was talk in the Duke of York’s household about a military deal with France. Pepys was told by a York courtier ‘that for a sum of money we shall enter a league with France’ and that Charles would use the money to dispense with Parliament. According to Pepys’s contact, Lady Castlemaine was ‘instrumental in this matter’.14
While the two kings haggled over a deal, domestic tragedy struck once more in the Palace of Whitehall. Queen Catherine miscarried a third time. The miscarriage was caused, it was thought, by a farcical incident in which one of the King’s many pets – a tame fox – jumped on her bed and ran across her face. The effect on the Queen can be imagined. No more pregnancies were reported after this date. It confirmed what many in the court had predicted – that the marriage would remain childless.
On the diplomatic front, another year of haggling and hesitation were to go by before the two kings could agree the main strands of the secret treaty. When concluded, it gave Louis what he most wanted – effectively a free hand for territorial expansion northward. And it seemed to promise Charles the money he needed to rule without Parliament. Lords Arlington and Clifford were later brought in to finesse the details. Along with the King’s brother James and the Catholic courtier Lord Arundel they alone of the English were allowed to know of the grand design.
Minette arrived at Dover in May 1670 supposedly on a visit to her beloved brother, but in fact to speak for her cousin the Sun King in the final haggling over the pact. It had to be done in Dover because of difficulties put up by Monsieur, the Princess’s husband. His relationship with Minette had become venomous after she persuaded Louis to imprison the Chevalier de Lorraine, her husband’s gay lover, for boasting that he could wreck her marriage. The Chevalier was sent to the Château d’lf, the grim island prison immortalised by Alexandre Dumas in The Count of Monte Cristo. When approached by Louis to agree the trip, the vengeful Philippe replied, ‘To England? I won’t even let her go to Flanders.’ He eventually agreed, but stipulated that his wife go no more than ten miles inland.15
